You heard writing articles is a great way to drive traffic to your site. So you have written several articles and posted them to dozens of article sites. Then you sit back and wait for the avalanche of traffic. And wait. Nothing is happening. What’s the deal?

The deal is depending on where your article gets republished your links may not be “live”. Writing articles and posting them is a great way to drive traffic to your site. Search engines love it and if done correctly it will help drive new visitors to your site and get you listed higher in the search engines. The problem comes when article writers and authors and publishers don’t all follow the same rules. The main problems are:

1. Original article not formatted correctly
2. Article copied and pasted into new webpage without links
3. New publisher doesn’t make links live

Lets start with #1 “Original article not formatted correctly”. Not all article sites are the same. On some sites you can simply put in plain text and it will format it correctly, paragraphs will be correct and it will recognize http://www.yoursite.com as a live link. Some sites you may need to format it all in html. Sometimes the easiest way to do that is type your article in a web design program such as “Dreamweaver” and then view the source and copy and paste the code. If you don’t have access to such a program then you should learn a few basic html tags:

View the source of this page to see the html tags.

This is a “break” tag, The break tag is used when you want to end a line, but don't want to start a new paragraph. The break tag forces a line break wherever you place it, a very common tag and one that is recognized by most all article sites.

Bold anything you want in bold should go between these tags

italic anything you want in italic should go between these tags

http://www.yoursite.com--some sites will recognize this as a live link. Many will not! This is where you are going to lose your links! If your article is copied and pasted into another web page or ezine your link will not be clickable. Someone who really wants to go to your webpage can copy and paste it into their browser but it is alot easier if someone can just click on it! If it is not a clickable live link search engines will not follow it not matter how many times it is republished. Imangine your article being reprinted 1000 times, a potential of 1000 back links to your site but without it being a clickable link you won’t reap the benefits of those 1000 links. Your links to your sites should always be formatted this way:

If you follow the correct html formating for links your website links will always be clickable. To learn more about html tags search google for "html tags"

2. Article copied and pasted into new webpage without links. Your article may be correctly formatted on the article site you posted to but when it is copied and pasted into a new webpage or ezine it may lose some of it’s formatting. Some of the better sites have a choice of “ezine ready”, this will display your article in the correct html formatting which makes it easier to copy and paste.

3. New publisher doesn’t make links live. All article sites have a policy that clearly states “you are free to republish the article as long as the links and author bio stays with the article” Some don’t realize your links are no longer live or don’t know to make them live. Others leave them off all together or don’t make them live on purpose. Not much you can do except write to the website owner and request they make them live. Some will comply, some won’t. Chalk it up to the cost of doing business. For everysite that doesn’t make your links live, 10 will.

Keep publishing! Writing articles and posting them across the internet is still a great way to drive traffic to your site. Content is king and website owners, and ezine publishers are hungry for fresh new original content.

This article is free for republishing

TJ Smith is the creative force behind several websites including Article Boy article submission site and content archive and The Blogger Nation Blog Directory